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Geoffrey Ward

Geoffrey C. Ward, a historian, screenwriter, and former editor of American Heritage, is the author of sixteen books, including A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, which won the 1989 National Critics Circle Award, the 1990 Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book, A Disposition to be Rich, a life of his great-grandfather, the celebrated nineteenth-century swindler Ferdinand Ward, was published in June of 2012.

He has written or co-written more than 20 documentary films, including Huey Long, The Civil War, Baseball, The West, Unforgivable Blackness, The War and Prohibition and is the winner of six Emmy Awards and a Writers Guild Award for screenwriting. He and Ken Burns have been working together for more than 25 years. He is currently working on two series – The Roosevelts and Vietnam – and a book on the Partition of India, where he spent several boyhood years.

Categories: Author and Writer, Human Interest, Town Halls

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The Age of Prohibition

The American Experience

The Civil War

Books

Shadow Ball: The History of the Negro Leagues (Baseball the American Epic)

Shadow Ball: The History of the Negro Leagues (Baseball the American Epic)

More than forty outstanding archival photographs, accompanied by a fast-paced, readable text, chronicle the history of the Negro Leagues and profile some of the finest players of the era.

You can purchase this book here

A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt

A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt

This notable biography concentrates on character and personality rather than politics or policymaking. Beginning in 1905, with Franklin and Eleanor's honeymoon, it covers FDR's years as New York state senator, assistant secretary of the Navy, his early struggle to overcome the ravages of polio and ends with his election as governor of New York in 1928. Ward not only traces the development of Roosevelt's "first-class temperament" but provides dimensional characterizations of friends, enemies and family members, gallantly defending FDR's often-maligned mother, Sara, and revealing the effect on the Roosevelt children of the tensions between Franklin and Eleanor. FDR's jaunty, fun-loving nature and his "breezy duplicity" are brought into focus in the early sections, but the tone deepens in the moving account of the future president's valiant but hopeless attempt to regain the use of his legs. Going against the accepted legend, Ward maintains that "the Roosevelt who could not walk was in most respects very like the one who could."

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The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945

The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945

The vivid voices that speak from these pages are not those of historians or scholars. They are the voices of ordinary men and women who experienced-and helped to win-the most devastating war in history, in which between 50 and 60 million lives were lost. Focusing on the citizens of four towns- Luverne, Minnesota; Sacramento, California; Waterbury, Connecticut; Mobile, Alabama;-The War follows more than forty people from 1941 to 1945. Woven largely from their memories, the compelling, unflinching narrative unfolds month by bloody month, with the outcome always in doubt. All the iconic events are here, from Pearl Harbor to the liberation of the concentration camps-but we also move among prisoners of war and Japanese American internees, defense workers and schoolchildren, and families who struggled simply to stay together while their men were shipped off to Europe, the Pacific, and North Africa. Enriched by maps and hundreds of photographs, including many never published before, this is an intimate, profoundly affecting chronicle of the war that shaped our world.

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The Civil War: An Illustrated History

The Civil War: An Illustrated History

"The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads: the suffering, the enormous tragedy of the whole thing." - Shelby Foote, from The Civil War When the illustrated edition of The Civil War was first published, The New York Time hailed it as "a treasure for the eye and mind." Now Geoffrey Ward's magisterial work of history is available in a text-only edition that interweaves the author's narrative with the voices of the men and women who lived through the cataclysmic trial of our nationhood: not just Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Robert E. Lee, but genteel Southern ladies and escaped slaves, cavalry officers and common foot soldiers who fought in Yankee blue and Rebel gray. The Civil War also includes essays by our most distinguished historians of the era: Don E. Fehrenbacher, on the war's origins; Barbara J. Fields, on the freeing of the slaves; Shelby Foote, on the war's soldiers and commanders; James M. McPherson, on the political dimensions of the struggle; and C. Vann Woodward, assessing the America that emerged from the war's ashes.

You can purchase this book here

A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor's Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States

A Disposition to Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor's Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in the United States

Ferdinand Ward was the greatest swindler of the Gilded Age. Through his unapologetic villainy, he bankrupted Ulysses S. Grant and ran roughshod over the entire world of finance. Now, his compelling, behind-the-scenes story is told-told by his great-grandson, award-winning historian Geoffrey C. Ward. Ward was the Bernie Madoff of his day, a supposed genius at making big money fast on Wall Street who turned out to have been running a giant pyramid scheme-one that ultimately collapsed in one of the greatest financial scandals in American history. The son of a Protestant missionary and small-town pastor with secrets of his own to keep, Ward came to New York at twenty-one and in less than a decade, armed with charm, energy, and a total lack of conscience, made himself the business partner of the former president of the United States and was widely hailed as the "Young Napoleon of Finance." In truth, he turned out to be a complete fraud, his entire life marked by dishonesty, cowardice, and contempt for anything but his own interests. Drawing from thousands of family documents never before examined, Geoffrey C. Ward traces his great-grandfather's rapid rise to riches and fame and his even more dizzying fall from grace. There are mistresses and mansions along the way; fast horses and crooked bankers and corrupt New York officials; courtroom confrontations and six years in Sing Sing; and Ferdinand's desperate scheme to kidnap his own son to get his hands on the estate his late wife had left the boy. Here is a great story about a classic American con artist, told with boundless charm and dry wit by one of our finest historians.

You can purchase this book here

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